The "Mark as Read" feature???

I have been chewing cud for a long time now, so my memory may be fading, but I could swear that in the old days when I was just a spry young bull, that if I opened all messages in a thread, they automatically got marked as read, and that no manual clicking on "mark as read" was necessary. Why in heck was that ever changed and why in heck can't the dang thing just mark everything that you do read automatically without bovine intervention? If I had a penny for every time that nagged at me I'd be one rich Cow.

Re: The "Mark as Read" feature???by David Roth Weiss on Oct 5, 2007 at 5:13:16 pm

Dear Abraham & Ron,

I am not at all clear about the more technical side of the Creative Cow underpinnings that you guys have mentioned in response to my post, but I can say that Abraham's new tweak sure seems like it has provided the cure for exactly what I was mooing about.

Thanks fellas!!! Now I can get back to chewing my cud and daydreaming about heifers.

This only worked automatically in and with each of the single posts. It has never worked automatically with the view entire thread at once mechanism.

When we added the ability to view the entire thread at once, we had to add a link -- Curtis wrote the functionality first, and Eric later rewrote it when he changed the mechanism to a new system == that allowed users to "mark as read" the threads.

This happened as there is simply no easy way to mark a thread as read and also allow for new posts to occur within a thread and have those posts remain marked unread, and therefore apparent to a reader that new posts have been added to a thread.

Therefore, the mechanism can't just mark a thread -- if it does so, then new posts added to the thread will also show as having been read.

You can only mark a "state" of a thread at a given time and -- within our system as it has been up to now -- that requires the user to mark the thread as read (which then marks the state of the thread at that given time, allowing new posts to occur and have them showing as freshly added to a user).

Abraham has been exploring new ideas and methods as to how to accomplish things in the COW, and perhaps he will find a new way of doing it that works. But please keep in mind that neither Curtis nor Eric could find a way of doing it that didn't require tracking each and every thing that a user does and maintaining that information in a database -- which we don't want to do.